


Shadow Blooms

by Reera the Red (nimmieamee)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dark, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 13:14:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18638839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/Reera%20the%20Red
Summary: "Whatever you get when a shadow blooms, Ronan. Whatever you get when you shave off a piece of the dark."





	Shadow Blooms

**Author's Note:**

> Back to trying to clean out all my old unfinished fic. And what do you know? I found me a bizarre AU.

Ronan was special.

So was his father, but Niall wasn't special in the same way. Niall was a gun, a speeding car, the low slant of a knife just out of sight of the intended victim. 

In his defense, Niall promised excitement. But excitement didn't have to mean _good_.

Declan wasn't good either. But that autumn in New Jersey, it was not Declan who miscalculated. There was nothing special about Declan, but he had become practiced at identifying when others were special. Niall had said, once, that Declan was the only one of them who could look at the world twice-ways, see with one eye the normal world and with the other eye the fairy hill, the lines of power, the crones and the witches and magic forests, and know all the magic at once for what it was. Niall often said that Declan was so normal that he could be counted on to understand what was – and was not – his birthright.

Ronan thought that this statement was meant to compliment Declan. Declan understood that it was meant to compliment Ronan.

Only Declan saw Joseph Kavinsky for what he was, and so it was Declan who showed up with a gun and a car just in time to save Niall. They were by the shore, and the sea air was bloated with the iron smell of Niall bleeding out. Ronan remembered that acutely, and in his dreams in the chair by his father’s hospital bed he built savage, eyeless egrets with blackened bat wings and jittery horse hooves. 

After two weeks, he brought them out by accident. They screamed horribly. The nurse walked in and screamed right back when she saw them, then ran out to the hall.

Declan, who was conscious when Niall was not, rolled his eyes and said what Niall would have said. “Jersey devils, Ronan? Really? You can do better than that.”

Ronan almost hit him, but before he could move they heard the sound of two gunshots from the hallway.

Piper came in. Her gun was mint green today, to match her nails. She brushed her hair out of her face in a way that probably looked attractive and deadly. Declan twitched, shifting his body to hide the effect this had on him.

Then Piper shot the Jersey devils until their wailing quieted and they stopped moving.

“I’m not cleaning those up. They’re so ugly,” she said, like she would have cleaned them up had they been nice-looking. She wouldn't have, even though Piper liked dead things. She especially liked them when the dead things could make a neat addition to her collection. She had her own Jersey devil – the real one – stuffed and mounted on the wall of her bedroom back in Boston. It was apparently a magnificent thing, but Ronan had never seen it. He only knew about it because Niall often complained about the way it seemed to watch you while you slept.

The devils on the floor of the hospital room had no such power. They were eyeless, flawed. Not to mention polluted with blood and, for some reason, the smell of car oil.

Declan cleaned them up. 

Then Declan left to clean up the body of the nurse and to get another nurse and to fix anything else that needed fixing, the cumulative effects of Piper and Ronan. Declan was good at that. He was normal. Piper and Ronan were special.

Piper was special like a Laumonier, because she was one. She settled into the chair Declan had vacated. Ronan hit the arm of his chair with a fist. He'd already been enraged, but now his rage hung heavier because she was here.

“You make shitty friends,” Piper said.

“Shut up,” said Ronan.

“Statement of fact, not insult,” said Piper, rolling her eyes. "You and the Jersey trash prince of the east coast. He's actually--"

“ _Shut up_ , taint!” Ronan snarled.

In the hospital bed, Niall was stirring.

“Whatever,” Piper said. “I don’t care. You’re so disrespectful.” She pulled out her phone and frowned at it. Over her shoulder, Ronan could see that she had booked a kickboxing appointment that conflicted with a yoga appointment. He wanted break her phone. 

The latticework of their lives should have held no room for yoga appointments. Constant travel, gunshots clouding the sea air, Laumonier and Greenmantle feuding for as long as Ronan could remember.

Niall, who was prophesied to die at Greenmantle’s command, had always known what side he would come down on.

This was part of what made Niall special: he walked alongside his own dead reflection, always. When he grinned, that was the thing he was grinning at. That Niall-To-Come, that Niall-Who-Could-Not-Live. Greenmantle would kill him. Every psychic the Lynches had ever encountered had predicted as much. This, Niall liked to remind the boys, did not necessarily mean Greenmantle would do it in person, particularly since Greenmantle did not like to dirty his own hands.

But still: there it was, that unerringly specific future. Ronan knew that this was what he should care most about. But it didn’t seem real. Even in a hospital bed, Niall looked startlingly alive, broad chest ballooning with health. After a minute, his muscled forearm thumped the side of the bed near Ronan. Once. Twice.

“Kavinsky,” he said.

“It wasn’t him who was working with Greenmantle,” Ronan told him, forcing the words out through his anger. “I mean. It was, but it was the wrong one. We picked the wrong one.”

Niall frowned without opening his eyes. Thinking.

“Declan should have been the one to approach the boy,” was all he said. That was it. Declan himself had suggested this, a month ago, before it had all happened, but Niall had shot him down. 

Declan liked to imply that he could see things Niall couldn’t, that in Ronan’s great purity and light and specialness there was something else different about Ronan that only Declan could see. 

Niall, to his credit, never listened to any of that. Probably because Piper was there in his other ear, saying something like, “Oh my god. That’s so gendered, you know, it’s, like -- like buying into stereotypes about masculinity? And that’s so offensive.”

Given Piper’s general Piperness, her ability to influence Niall was a great mystery to Ronan.

“You shouldn't have been involved at all," Niall said now.

 _You're special_ , hung in the air, unsaid. _You're special, Ronan._

And this was true.

Niall dreamed things with razor edges. Guns that couldn’t miss, traps that never failed. Once, when they’d been in Vancouver, he’d dreamed a whirring silver bee and given it to a boy about Ronan’s age. ( _To get Seondeok on our side_ , he’d told Declan. _No, I did it because I liked him_ , he’d told Ronan.) Last Ronan had heard, Greenmantle had kidnapped the boy and nearly killed him. Just to get at Niall’s dream. 

Niall's dreams were like. Rotted fruit, violence, and bones. But people wanted them. People wanted them always.

People wanted Ronan’s dreams too. But Niall had decreed that Ronan’s dreams should be different. Less bite to Ronan’s dreams. Less of a blood trail, if they could help it. Not for Ronan, these gifts with teeth.

After all, when Ronan’s mother and younger brother had been killed, Niall had dreamed a spiked bat and broken everything in his hotel room to pieces with it. But Ronan, who’d been in the room next door with Declan, had reacted very differently. He had dreamt that Matthew and Aurora had been following him obediently, like ducklings, and then great holes of nothingness had begun to eat at them, and then the great holes of nothingness _had_ eaten them, and then the great holes of nothingness had started in on _Ronan_ , targeting those quiet places in the mind full of Matthew-ducklings and Aurora-ducklings. Declan had been sitting impassively to one side and saying, “Forgetting helps, you know. Forgetting helps.”

And when Ronan woke he was being attacked by something worse than the Jersey devils, a proper night horror, one even Declan couldn’t fight off. Declan had yelled for Niall and Niall had come in and hit it until it stopped. Stared at the places where the hooked beak and claws had gouged Ronan’s skin. 

Said, “But why would you do this to yourself?” as if he couldn’t be counted on to understand.

Niall aimed his razors out. Ronan’s razors were just as likely to cut in. Even before Matthew and Aurora had died, while Niall had been dreaming guns and traps, Ronan had been dreaming balls of light and coating the car interior with green ivy. Niall had always shaped his anger into whirring insects to spy on his enemies. Ronan had peeled off his sadness and presented it to his mother in the mornings: a perfumed umbel, potently with the smell of oranges. 

Even Ronan’s devils were no proper weapon. Savage, but eyeless. Ronan fisted his hands and tried not to think of what Niall would have said if Declan hadn't cleaned them up in time. Niall _liked_ Ronan to dream light and ivy. This was useless to Laumonier, but to Niall this was the shade of Aurora walking next to Ronan, always. This was proof that Ronan was different, Ronan was better than Niall, Ronan was special.

“I should kill your fathers,” Niall said now, to Piper. “For suggesting that Ronan be the one to talk to the boy.”

“I should kill this, I should kill that,” Piper said, doing a fair mimicry of Niall’s accent. “You live in this, like, polluted _ecosystem_ of medieval honor killing. You should stop dick measuring and read Reychler on conflict resolution.” She looked back at her phone, disgusted.

“Declan!” Niall said. “Declan!”

Declan came in. He was wearing bloody surgical gloves, which he peeled off easily, replacing them with a clean pair from the cabinet. 

"He's going to Banbridge," Niall said, jerking his chin at Ronan. Then, to Ronan, "You're going to Banbridge."

“No,” Ronan said immediately.

Grey grass and grey roads and grey housing estates loomed large. He was hitting the arms of the chair again, every strike a sharp, ugly rap against his knuckles. The pain was loud, orange-colored in his mind. It was fierce. He decided, perversely, that he liked it.

“Albuquerque then,” Niall said. “You’ll stay with Torres for a few months.” He flicked at something on his shoulder – a shadow. But not a shadow, obviously. Not quite shadow, not quite cobweb, it slithered across the room and enveloped Ronan’s chair, covering it completely. It was treacherously silken, purring against his fist, easy and soft and protective. Niall looked at it clinically, as if he wasn’t sure this was the best use for it. Ronan tried to pull out his lighter to set it on fire. The shadow wouldn’t light.

“You’ll have to dream a better fire to get rid of that,” Niall said. He held out a hand for the lighter. Ronan threw it at him with some force. Niall grinned and caught it easily, curving his fingers around it. The nurses had mostly cleaned away his smoke smudges, but in his sleep he’d painted his hands blue and purple and grey somehow, and every bit of skin from his wrists to his fingers retained the color now. Watercolor-stained with dreams. 

“Albuquerque or Banbridge,” Niall said. Barely a question.

“I’ll come back,” Ronan threatened.

Teleportation devices were easy. Mirror-travel was child’s play if you dreamed the mirror. Cars were a challenge, but Ronan could do cars too – engineless and growling, impatient to get him back to his family, to restore him from whatever protective exile Niall felt like throwing on him.

“Will you come back?” Niall said now. “Can you come back?”

Niall could stopper up the teleporters and reverse the path of the mirrors. Niall could cheerfully take a bat to the cars and very happily steer Ronan by a shoulder, turn him around, point out a door that hadn’t been there before. A dream door, temperamental, with teeth. Open it in New Jersey. Walk through. There he was after that, in Albuquerque, with some impatient babysitter lecturing him for trying to get back east, with Niall and Declan already making plans to move on before he could find them again.

Even though Ronan knew there was no use, he tried to hit the chair again. Niall’s cobweb-shadows curled powerfully around his wrists.

“Albuquerque,” Niall decided, lighting a cigarette and taking a drag, letting it rest in his wonderful watercolor hands. “Declan!”

Declan had been there the whole time, but he hadn’t spoken. He never said Ronan should stay, and never fought to keep Ronan when Niall wanted Ronan somewhere safe. 

Declan, the accomplice. Typical of him, to stand silent until Niall required him for something. Ronan had forgotten he was even in the room. Ronan had even forgotten Piper was in the room. Ronan usually did forget things like other people, when he was with Niall. 

“Call Torres,” Niall said now. “Make arrangements to send him to Albuquerque.”

"Yes, sir," said Declan, locating their bags behind Piper's chair and pulling out phones and maps and books of contacts. Ronan mimicked him it began to sound ridiculous, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir."

"Shut up," Declan said.

"God, he deserved to get tricked by the drug kingpin of Aglionby, Virginia," Piper said.

" _Yes, sir_ ," Ronan said, higher, crueller, until midway through this refrain something occurred to him. Then something else, something more immediate. His wrists were still trapped. "Yes, s--what the fuck is this?"

"It's for you," Niall said coolly, taking another drag of his cigarette and bringing himself gingerly to the edge of the bed. He managed to get his hospital gown off without much effort and without letting go of the cigarette. He was watercolor-patterned across his chest, but now Ronan couldn't tell if it was dreams or bruising.

"What _is_ it?" Ronan insisted. The harder he pulled the harder it held. He tried to think like Niall. He went lax. Like a finger-trap, it responded. It curled back onto the chair with a purr.

"Fluidity," Niall said now. "Or patience. Or whatever you get when a shadow blooms, Ronan. Whatever you get when you shave off a piece of the dark."

-

Ronan, of course, knew what you got when that happened. Kavinsky had shown him.

The younger one. Not the older one. The older Kavinsky was like Niall: a dreamer. But he was smaller than Niall. He dreamed money laundering schemes. He dreamed barely-legal real estate bids. He had no real interest in whether Greenmantle beat Laumonier or Laumonier beat Greenmantle -- neither was prophesied to kill _him_ , and so it didn't matter, really, as long as he could get suitcases full of money from both sides.

The younger Kavinsky would never dream for something as pedestrian as a suitcase of money. No dreamer who was big would ever do that. Not really. 

Kavinsky-the-younger was not un-handsome, and had a slick sheen to his skin like he regularly bathed in gasoline. He also had an unnerving tendency to let his hands wander to Ronan's shoulders and arms without permission. He wouldn't leave marks but Ronan would feel them. Claw marks. Excitement would scrape up his throat.

"Yeah, he's taking money from Greenmantle," Kavinsky had said lazily, about his own father. "What are you going to do about it?"

It was a taunt, but it was also a point of pride: what are you going to do, and don't you want to know what _I_ would do?

Ronan had naturally wanted to know. People who weren't his father were generally beneath his notice, but Kavinsky was close enough to Niall to get him interested. Young, too, like Ronan. Like a bridge between the Lynch dreamers, or else maybe a wedge. But either way something in the middle, and if Ronan could feel his way around that something then maybe he could come closer to what Niall was.

"What are _you_ going to do?" he'd pressed.

Kavinsky had smiled lazily.

Over several starburst-weekends that summer, he had told Ronan, shown Ronan caches of pills. The Lynches were at least united on their side of the Laumonier-Greenmantle war. The Kavinskys simply were a war -- briskly violent together, viciously clever in how they spiked each other's food with poison, each other's mornings with poison, each other's lives with poison.

"You gotta get them full of stomach acid," Kavinsky had told Ronan. "Or else be some shit, you know, that hooks into the spine. Rips off the skin. You ever want to see somebody's bones? I do. I always do."

Kavinsky talked like this, in drugged loops. This didn't mean he wasn't dangerous. It wasn't Kavinsky-the-elder who alerted Greenmantle's people in the end. It was Ronan's Kavinsky, standing on the beach and laughing as they opened fire.

"Dad's got months to live," he'd said, when Ronan had dragged him behind a pier. 

"Your dad?" Ronan said. He still hadn't understood. He still thought Kavinsky's father had done this.

Kavinsky had jerked away.

"Fuck you," he'd said easily, words mingling with the gunshots. "When do I call him _dad_? Yours, man. Yours. I'm telling you: he's got just months to live. It's fucking prophesied. Did you know that? I bet you didn't know _I_ knew that."

Ronan reacted. It was the betrayal -- Kavinsky was the closest thing he had to a friend. It was the reality -- Kavinsky was only saying what Niall himself said. Ronan tore out from behind the pier and was on him, punching, not caring that bullets were whirring past him and that somewhere his father and Declan were shouting.

 _You're going to get shot_.

Impossibly, even as he punched Kavinsky in the teeth, he didn't want Kavinsky shot. A part of him pulled out of the punch and hauled Kavinsky up and said so, dragging him back to the pier.

"They're not shooting me," Kavinsky said, through a mouthful of blood. "Shit, man. I _called_ them."

Ronan stopped. The world narrowed. Why. Why?

"I like to pull back the skin," Kavinsky shouted, pushing away from Ronan. He ran into the surf, got his skinny legs covered in sand and cold salt spray. "I like to see the bones, you know?"

-

Niall always sent Ronan away, to Banbridge or Albuquerque or South fucking Dakota.

Ronan never stayed long if he could help it.

But this time, just once, there was a reason to stay away. Or at least to take a sharp left and turn up somewhere unexpected.

It came down to an offhand comment Piper had made: _the drug kingpin of Aglionby, Virginia_. 

The town wasn't called Aglionby. The school was called Aglionby. The town was _Henrietta_ , home of psychics. Of prophecies. 

_He got just months to live. It's fucking prophesied._

Niall liked to send Ronan away, and this time Ronan would go. But he wouldn't go to Albuquerque. He'd go somewhere that tasted like stomach acid or revenge.

Henrietta.

**Author's Note:**

> When TRK first came out I plotted out a long AU that was all about Ronan being, like, a vulnerable boy deserving of normal relationships and explicitly _not_ an inherently magic being whose capacity to dream puts him on some extrahuman level (look, I know the TRC I would have preferred, okay? let me live). But then, kind of as a result of TRK, I lost the will to finish it! I still like the AU setup, though. I am still very intrigued by the thought of a universe where Ronan got to keep Niall, but not Aurora and Matthew.


End file.
